Leaving Town Alive
by Scribbler
Summary: Mr Goh doesn't care about your background if you want a job in his shop, especially if you can look older than you actually are, and that's easy if you’ve spent as much time as me practising make-up tips in the mirror. My name was Miho. It's not anymore.


**Disclaimer****:** Driftingly not mine.

**A/N****:** Originally part of _As Deep As the Sky_, but it got too big. I have a chronic inability to shut the hell up, it seems.

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_**Leaving Town Alive**_

© Scribbler, February 2009.

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I sometimes wonder what would've happened if I'd turned left instead of right. It isn't some great cosmic question – I don't wonder whether I would've met the love of my life, or found a cheque for a million yen in the gutter as I stepped off the pavement, or been beamed up by aliens. I _do_ wonder whether the taxi that zoomed past a few seconds later would've provided a very quick solution to all my problems, though.

But I didn't turn left. I turned right, and in turning right I caught sight of a sign in the window of a little shop tucked away between the bakery and the betting place. It wasn't very big. It wasn't even spelled properly. In my other life – the life I had before the Friday before that day, if you can follow that, which I'm sure you can because you look pretty smart. I'll bet you get great grades at school, don't you? I never did. I'm a C student. I mean I _was_. Still, I can add up without using my fingers, and that automatically made me smarter than the guy behind the counter in that little shop, but he was looking at my chest anyway so I don't think it was my brains that made him employ me. Not many people … in fact _nobody_ has ever liked me for my brains. How sad is that? It's not like I'm stupid or anything. I was a ditz, sure, but they never had me in mind when they put labels on bags of peanuts saying 'Caution: may contain nuts'.

Pity party alert! And I'm getting ahead of myself. In my other life that dingy little shop with its 'HELP WONTED' sign would've made me shriek and run away – literally. No way would I have ever gone inside. It just shows what reaching the end of your tether will do to your standards, right? Or something. I had pretty double standards before that anyway – all smiles and cute little girl act at school, and then go home and wait with a sick feeling for Daddy to get home from work and come upstairs – so maybe it didn't do anything except make all my standards equal in their lowness.

Is that even a word – lowness? Like I said, I was never a great student. I liked gossip and girly stuff, not learning – unless it was learning the words to a song I liked when they were printed in a magazine. School was icky apart from seeing my friends. If it _is_ a real word it's a pretty good one to use for Mr. Goh and his shop. A person can lose herself there. I know because I did it. He's not too interested in labour laws or checking out the backgrounds of those who want jobs – even their ages if they looked older than they actually are, and it's pretty easy to do that if you've spent most of your previous life practising make-up and hair tips in the bathroom mirror so you can get the boys at school to do whatever you want. If you're willing to lower yourself to working behind his shop counter selling cheap bags of chemicals masquerading as candy, noodles made from whatever they swept off the factory floor and tins of hotdogs that may contain actual dogs, then you must be desperate enough not to argue about awful wages and working conditions, which are exactly the qualities Mr. Goh likes in his employees.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Mih-" I stopped myself.

"Mi-something?" he repeated doubtfully. I still hadn't cut my hair then, so I must've looked young enough to make even him nervous. The first thing I ever bought from my own wage packet was a pair of scissors, you know, and they added, like, at least five years to my face. "Mi-what?"

Suddenly my backpack felt really heavy, even though I'd stuffed practically nothing into it when I left. My clothes didn't weigh much and the food I'd packed was nearly all gone after three days on the run. Even my money was running low thanks to a train ticket out of Domino and what it took to keep off the streets at night. Who knew you had to pay for youth hostels? I didn't even have enough to make a call from a public telephone, and I'd forgotten the charger to my cell, so that was nothing more than a lump of plastic squashed uselessly against a polythene bag of fresh underwear. My prospects weren't exactly what you'd call stellar, you know?

I thought of my friends. It wasn't the first time I'd thought of them – no way – but just like before I couldn't bring myself to contact them. Not yet. I was too embarrassed to call them even if I'd been able to. How do you admit the kind of things I'd have to admit to people who think you're the happy-go-lucky, carefree one of the group?

Looking back, I was so stupid and still preoccupied with what other people thought – people who knew me, I mean, not new people like Mr. Goh. After the kinds of things we'd been through together, there was no way I should've thought my friends would be anything but supportive. They already knew about how my Mom ran away from us when I was a little kid, and they never said anything bad about her. We'd fought, like, _magic _and stuff together. Really and truly, no lie! And not just some knife-wielding kids-party-magician, either. I'm talking proper, real, honest-to-goodness magic. Or honest to badness, I should say, because it was pretty bad, the stuff we fought; not to mention that horrible incident with Seto Kaiba and his Death-T. Did you see that on TV? Yeah, I was there too, but I didn't get televised much, which was totally unfair because I looked pretty cute that day. I actually cared about stuff like that back then. It was the transition time, you know? That time between the me who cared about pairing the right shoes with the right outfit and the me who ran like hell away from her own home and uses words like 'transition' and 'masquerading'.

I'll admit, I was kind of freaked out actually. The Death-T and the magic and all that other stuff … I'd never come across anything like it before; not really, up close and personal and all in my face or anything, you know? It was like, here was all this stuff that should've brought me and my friends closer together, but in my head it drove me apart from them. They just accepted everything that was going on like it was totally normal. They accepted it like they accepted each other, and they told the truth, and so telling them about my dad and how I'd been lying to them for so long … at the time all I wanted to do was run away and hide. From, like, _everything_. I wasn't one of those kids from a manga story, you know? I couldn't just carry on like nothing had happened. My head was all full of junk from everything we'd been through, I was verging on Total Freak Out territory, and then one night Daddy came up to me room and afterwards I just … I decided 'no more'. It's hard to describe. Something snapped and the next thing I knew I was on a bus to the train station wearing my ickiest workout clothes.

I wonder if that's what my mom did when she left. Part of me wondered whether I'd somehow find her if I left too. Hey, if the rest of my life was turning into a weird manga plot, why not that part? Eyes meeting across a crowded square; recognising each other even though she left when I was only a little kid. Soppy, I know, but in those first few weeks at Mr. Goh's I used to lay in bed at night and make up stories about how one day she'd walk into the shop and we'd be reunited, and she'd take me to her new house – she always lived in a big house with French windows and en-suite bathrooms – and we lived happily ever after.

Sometimes I think I'm going to make that call back to Domino. It's been … well, it's been a while. I'm not sure who I'd call, though. Actually, I'm lying, I know exactly who I'd call, but I'm not sure what to say to him if I ever do. He _liked_ me back then, if you get what I mean. He kept talking about me being 'sweet' and 'pure' and stuff. I especially didn't want him to know about Daddy. That would've been just too … too … I'm not sure of the right words. It would've been just too _much_, you know?

So instead I ran away. Yeah, I know, like that was so much better? Goodness knows what he thinks of me _now_.

Maybe they're right. Maybe you really _can't_ go home again, even if you want to.

"Mimi," I lied to Mr. Goh. "My name's Mimi."

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_**Fin. **_

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_Oh, do you wonder where it starts?  
Where it ends?  
What you find around the bend?  
Oh, do you wonder where she's from?  
Where she goes?  
No one knows.  
Now and then you wonder  
Why you're spending all your money.  
Ain't it funny how she walks on by?  
She had you all believing;  
Now she's leaving for no reason  
And you're wondering why.  
So til' the morning breaks,  
Go and make your mistakes;  
Don't be surprised if your heart hurts.  
Life is for the living, the forgiven and for leaving town alive._

-- From **Leaving Town Alive **by Bethany Joy Lenz.

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